Crystal Dixon firing upheld: Nebraska Family Council falsely exploited case as religious liberty / freedom of speech issue in order to attack Lincoln LGBT law

A federal appeals court has upheld the University of Toledo’s decision to fire the college’s vice president of human resources who was canned in 2008 after writing an article in a local newspaper where she condemned gay rights, the Chronicle of Higher Education reports. The University of Toledo is a public municipal university. About four years ago, the Northwestern Ohio university fired Crystal Dixon over concerns about a column she wrote for the Toledo Free Press, where she said gays and lesbians have no claim to the civil rights movement... When her lawsuit went to court, U.S. District Judge David Katz ruled
against her and dismissed the case. "The balance of [Dixon’s] interest in making a comment of public concern is
clearly outweighed by the University’s interest as her employer in carrying out
its own objectives," the judge wrote in an opinion. "Therefore, [Dixon] has
failed to establish that her speech was protected. [Dixon] also claims that she
was fired for violating an impermissibly vague speech policy. However, the
damage she did to her ability to perform her job and to the University provide
ample justification for her termination." After appealing Katz’s ruling, a three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of
Appeals for the Sixth Circuit ruled on Monday that Dixon’s column "contradicted
the very policies she was charged with creating, promoting, and enforcing," and
her defense of being a private citizen does not excuse her from her remarks
against LGBT rights. The panel supported Katz’s decision and dismissed the case
once again.

Nebraska Family Council's
Al Riskowski

The Dixon case has been falsely cited by antigay organizations like the Nebraska Family Council, which referred to the case as a consequence of LGBT antidiscrimination ordinances both on NFC's website and before the Lincoln City Council. In fact, the ruling clearly shows that Dixon's termination had nothing to do with antidiscrimination ordinances, freedom of speech or religious liberty. Dixon publicly contradicted her employer's policies, which she was charged with implementing. Courts have long ruled that employers have no obligation to employ people who publicly subvert their lawful policies.
Links to news articles about the case appear on NFC's website under the following introduction:

Below: NFC's Hannah Buell begins her brazen falsehood at about the 1:20 mark: "...She [Dixon] was fired for exercising her first amendment rights to write a column to a newspaper and in that column she was writing as a private citizen, but she expressed disagreement with a bill, an ordinance similar to this and expressed her disagreement in that form. She was fired for this."

Contrary to Hannah Buell's untruthful testimony to the Lincoln City Council, Dixon's letter did NOT mention any LGBT ordinances at all — either similar or dissimilar to the one under consideration by Lincoln's City Council. You may read the letter that the Nebraska Family Council misrepresented here; it is still on the Toledo Free Press's website.
The Nebraska Family Council also distorted another case involving the boycott by gay patrons of a restaurant in West Hollywood after they found out that the Christian manager who posed as a friend to their community was secretly donating money to the Prop 8 effort to reverse marriage equality in California.

Maynard (Bob "Gilligan's Island" Denver) slyly flashes a nipple to the CBS eye while trying to talk his best buddy Dobie Gillis (Dwayne Hick­man) into taking off all his clothes. Whoever said 1950s television was a vast waste­land obviously didn't know where to look.